Middlemarch

Nov22

Bert Hornback looks at what Martin Amis and Julian Barnes have both described as 'probably the greatest novel in the English language'

Charles Dickens
prided himself on knowing that “George Eliot,” the author of Middlemarch, was a woman. He had written half of Bleak House as a woman in 1850-51, and had made Esther Summerson’s
voice significantly different from the omniscient narrator’s voice. Esther, after all, is a young woman –his
omniscient narrator in her late twenties when in the third chapter she begins,
somewhat shyly, to write what she calls her “portion” of the novel:

I have
a great deal of difficulty in beginning to write my portion of these pages, for
I know that I am not clever.

Dickens was
thirty-nine when he wrote his first “portion
of these pages,” beginning the novel with the most rhetorically powerful eight
hundred words in the history of English fiction:

London. Michelmas term lately over, and the Lord
Chancellor sitting in

Lincoln’s Inn
Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as

if the waters had
but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be

wonderful to meet
a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine

lizard up Holborn
Hill.. Smoke lowering down from
chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle with flakes of soot in it as big as
full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of
the sun.

. . .

This is the Court
of Chancery; which has its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every
shire; which has its worn-out lunatic in every madhouse, and its dead in every
churchyard; which has its ruined suitor, with his slipshod heels and threadbare
dress, borrowing and begging through the round of every man’s acquaintance;
which gives to monied might the means abundantly of wearing out the right;
which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope; so overthrows the brain
and breaks the heart; that there is not an honourable man among its
practitioners who would not give—who does not often give—the warning, ‘Suffer
any wrong that can be done you, rather than come here!’

When
Esther’s turn as narrator comes beginning in chapter three, her voice is much,
much different from Dickens’s. (From, not than, as American illiteracy says.)

But though
Esther’s rhetoric is radically different from her creator’s, their attitudes
and understandings are quite similar, and on at least two occasions they treat
material in somewhat the same way, with similar imagery. I mention this because I want to suggest
that, as readers, we not think of Esther’s narrative—in its manner or in its
understanding—as in any way inferior or simply “secondary” to the omniscient
narrator’s part of the novel. Esther knows that she is writing only a
“portion” of the story, but that doesn’t mean that she doesn’t know—or isn’t
always learning—the world that the omniscient narrator knows. And by its final chapter, which she writes,
she is a wise woman, and Dickens lets the novel be her novel.

George Eliot’s
narrator, in Middlemarch, knows the
world as well as Dickens does, though as a narrator she is more like Esther
than she is like Esther’s creator. Maybe Esther, at Dickens’s age, would have
written her part of Bleak House more
like George Eliot. When Esther concludes the final chapter of Bleak House with a dash, an incomplete
sentence, it means that she isn’t finished—with her life, with her work, with
her writing. Maybe twenty or so years
on, she will write her own version of Middlemarch.

When you finish
reading Bleak House, you should read Middlemarch—or read it again. It is one of the three or four best novels
ever written, one of the most moving and inspiring. And when you have finished Middlemarch, you might read another book
almost as wonderful as it is: a recent book by Rebecca Mead called My Life in Middlemarch.

“Middlemarch” is
the world of Eliot’s novel, though it extends to other parts of England, even
including London, and to Paris and Rome.
Middlemarch itself is a small but representative human place in the Southeast
of England, and the penultimate chapter takes place “just after the Lords have
thrown out the Reform Bill” in 1832.
Dorothea Brooke’s honeymoon in Rome doesn’t signify “the large” world”
or “the great world.” Still, though the
House of Lords had rejected the Reform Bill—“the Rinform,” to tenant-farmer
Dagley on one of Mr. Brook’s farms——by the end of the novel England was changing. And Dorothea, with her husband Will Ladislaw,
live in London, not in Middlemarch. Will
is a Member of Parliament. Eliot’s first
readers would have understood the significance of this: the Second Reform Bill
had become law two years before Eliot began writing Middlemarch in 1869.

There are
three—maybe four—main parts to the large web which Eliot weaves as Middlemarch.
Dorothea Brooke in the main character in the first; she and her
uncle and her sister bring in the Chettams, the Cadwalladers, and the Rev. Mr.
Casaubon. Casaubon will introduce Will
Ladislaw. The Vincy and Garth families together bring in the Bulstrodes, old
Peter Feartherstone, and most of the rest of Middlemarch. Tertius Lydgate-- the new doctor in town (who
has studied in Paris)--is introduced at a party at the Vincys’ house; he intends to be independent—but that’s
hard, in Middlemarch

George Eliot’s
heroine, Dorothea Brooke, is an orphan, her parents having died when she was
twelve. She has been raised and educated
first in an English family and then with a Swiss family. As the novel opens, she and her sister have
come to live in mostly rural Middlemarch with their wealthy uncle, “a man
nearly sixty, of acquiescent temper, miscellaneous opinions, and uncertain
vote.” Like Jane Austen’s Emma, Dorothea
is “handsome, clever, and rich”—but unlike Emma, a “strain of Puritan energy .
. . glowed” through Dorothea, complicating her beauty and her quick
intelligence, and making her uncomfortable with her wealth—which, of course,
seems perverse to her neighbors.
Dorothea is like Dickens’s Esther in her desire to be good and to do
good, but her situation in life is more like Emma’s. (Dorothea would not have approved of Emma,
but she would have admired Esther very much.)

Dorothea is one of
the most complex and complete characters in English fiction. Eliot’s heroine is very beautiful, highly
observant, thoroughly intelligent, determinedly good, often self-critical,
sometimes willful, independent, idealistic, and figuratively myopic. At the beginning of the novel, she lives in
“the prosaic neighborhood of Middlemarch,” which is both rural England in the
mid-nineteenth century and the large, richly complicated world.

Tertius Lydgate,
the young physician who comes to Middlemarch, is—like Dorothea—an
idealist. He is a scientist as well as a
medical doctor, and his “plan for his future” is “to do good small work for
Middlemarch, and great work for the world.”
He is thwarted—thwarts himself—and does neither. Edward Casaubon has a great (and greatly
absurd) project: “The Key to All Mythologies.”
Almost all the other characters have ambitions as well. Dorothea’s stands out: she has a desire for greatness, but not for
herself.

Middlemarch
is
long and large, leisurely but at times intensely dramatic. It is both panoramic in its view and
microscopically penetrating. Near the
middle of the third of its six books, Eliot writes:

An eminent philosopher among my
friends. . . has shown me this pregnant little fact. Your pier-glass or extensive surface of
polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and
multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted
candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange
themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are
going everywhere impartially, and it is only your candle which produces the
flattering illusion of concentric arrangement, its light falling with an
exclusive optical selection. These
things are a parable.

Immediately—in
this chapter—“these things are a parable,” as Eliot introduces first Rosamond
Vincy’s interest in Tertius Lydgate, and then Lydgate’s interest in her. Eliot frequently refers to webs in Middlemarch; the whole novel is her
intricately assembled narrative web.
This particular web, however, is Rosamond’s, woven to catch Lydgate, who
is often in the Vincy house .and carelessly available to be caught.

Fred Vincy sees himself as caught in
a web of debt, but it is of course a web of his own making. A web of suspicion surrounds the death of
Raffles. Casaubon, at work always on his
“Key to All Mythology,” organizes his notes “in pigeon-holes”—but that is not
really organization, and he can never make anything coherent of his work: there is no “Key.” Mr. Brooke has a collection of various paper,
but they are unarranged—and will remain so:
his life is not web-like, but scattered and scattering.

George Eliot
organizes the large and various world of this immense novel coherently. Her “parable” of the polished pier-glass
perfectly describes Middlemarch itself, which Eliot brings into focus for us,
chapter by chapter.

Eliot’s opens Middlemarch with “Miss Brook”—the
chapter title, and the novel’s first words.
Eliot focuses on Dorothea; but when Dorothea shows her “plans” for
Middlemarch to her sister, Eliot reminds us that Celia too has “opinions” and a
point of view. And Celia’s pet name for
her older sister is “Dodo.” The second
chapter introduces Mr, Brooke, the girls’ uncle and guardian, who is incapable
of focusing on anything; and Mr. Casaubon whose focus is pretentiously immense—but
his eyes are weak: he is nearly blind. In chapter ten, Eliot pauses to lecture us on
“focus,” proposing that as focus is a matter of choice, it must be understood as
at least in part a matter of self-centeredness.
In chapter fifteen, Eliot writes that her own work—her focus—is “unravelling
certain human lots, and seeing how they are woven and interwoven into a web.”

Chapter twenty-nine takes place not long
after Dorothea’s and Casaubon’s return from their honeymoon to Rome.

One
morning, some weeks after her arrival at Lowick , Dorothea—but why always
Dorothea? Was her point of view the only
possible one . . . ?

Of course it isn’t. But Dorothea’s sympathetic understanding of this world is the most important for this
world, and “the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably
diffusive.” And with that assertion, at
the end of the novel, Eliot changes the image of the web into one of radiance.